Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price meals.

This is an abject failure of American society. Meals at schools need to be restructured as a cultural commonality that *BONDS* community in the same way (or better) than obligatory military service did in 1950. I admit the segregated military forces got a lot wrong, so the analogy has a lot of flaws. But part of "Americana" should become we all share lunch together at school irrespective of socioeconomic status. No classification of whoever kids, black kids, rich kids, poor kids, or anything. So, a rural far boy white kid, an urban inner city black kid, and an "indeterminate race" gated community lawyers kid all talk about their "American" lunch in their 30s. This also allows addressing all the nutritional concerns that get brought up in the "school lunch" supplemental programs while removing the stigma of supplementation for socioeconomic reasons. I'm not so naive to believe that the gated community lawyer's kid's lunches won't be different than the inner city ghetto lunches. But everybody gets lunch. Period.

More than a quarter of the families who signed up for Advantage became homeless again, returning to a shelter system that spends roughly $3,000 per month on each family—more than double Supreme and Chanel’s rent subsidy.

Obviously this is too simple an explanation. But it's telling in its simplicity. Helping in the mainstream is less expnsive than carrying outside the mainstream

Nothing counts like the people who show up.

Isn't this true for everything? Like Woody Allen says.

Some Americans can afford to skip the lines of bureaucracy. They hire private agents to secure a new passport or a marriage certificate. The poor pay with their time.

“This kid was dealt a bad hand,” Bloomberg says. “I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes, some of us are lucky and some of us are not.”

Very similar to Jimmy Carter's note that "there are many things in life that are not fair."

“Reading all those books made him a racist,” she later says. “He can’t function because he’s too worried about what the white man gonna do. What are you gonna do?”

This is an elephant in the room.

In 2013, Seth Pollak, a child psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, examined the brain scans of seventy-seven infants from a range of economic backgrounds, following them for three years. He focused on the parts of the brain that are less hereditary and more influenced by the child’s environment. At first, the scans were identical. But by age four, the poor children had developed less “gray matter,” the areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional behavior, problem solving, memory, and other skills critical to learning.

Put another way: More than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt’s landmark conference concluded that America’s homes “should not be broken up for reasons of poverty,” the federal government is giving ten times as much money to programs that separate families (most of them poor) as to programs that might preserve them.

When families of means are in crisis, friends and relatives tend to offer material help. They drop off casseroles or make phone calls to doctors. They see their primary purpose as one of stress reduction, because no family can properly function—much less attend therapy—when the electricity has been cut or the fridge is empty. Yet when poor families enter the child protection system, the opposite tends to happen. Parents must attend therapy or parenting classes. This approach, writes the scholar Dorothy Roberts, “hides the systemic reasons for poor families’ hardships by primarily attributing them to parental deficits and pathologies that require therapeutic remedies rather than social change.”

This is how they break the bond,

I think this is true. The family bonds are broken, sometimes intentionally, which perpetuates the poverty cycle. Read the whole previous chapter.

The family’s well-off neighbors knew of the abuse but kept it quiet.

This really means the neighbors were virtually enemies, not friends. Pretending everything is ok just makes it worse.

“Home is the people. The people I hang out with. The people I grew up with. That, to be honest, is really home. Family who have had my back since day one. It doesn’t have to be a roof over my head….

This geographical stroke of luck gives Chanel a boost. She is certain that her late mother, Joanie, is behind it, scheming with God to outmaneuver the city’s agencies.

This is an excellent viewpoint.

We went out. We talked a lot. And that, right there, is the most beneficial part of a boy’s life: to be able, at the end of the day, to have a conversation with his father. So that he can know that what he’s doing, as a boy, is right. You understand what I’m saying? That he’s on the right path. That he’s doing the right things. That’s what helps his confidence.

During economic downturns, it is often the poorest Americans who are the most charitable.

Society does not see Chanel and Supreme as former children, which makes it easier to blame them for their problems.

This is, perhaps, the singular explanatory observation in the whole book. The conditions perpetuate precisely because the the adults are products of the system.